[gradstudent]

I tried NixOS a few months ago, when I had to choose a new OS for my laptop.

On the one hand, it's great, as so many others here and TFA have attested. Declaratively specifying your system configuration and using snapshots to keep track of everything is a complete game-changer. Similarly great is the absolutely huge universe of installable packages. The coverage here is so much better than what's on offer from Ubuntu or Fedora.

On the other hand, the current implementation is still a bit of a shit-show.

First, there's nix-the-OS and nix-the-package-manager which is pretty confusing. Effectively it means you manage your OS with one declarative system and your local/home config with another. Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood, that seem to offer a different modality altogether.

Second, installing packages is nice, but also confusing. Do you install a package or a service? Often both are available and the difference is not always clear. Eventually I learned to choose a service whenever one was available. In either case, the tendency of package maintainers is to install the smallest possible version of whatever you asked for. For example, I wanted KDE but what I got was a bare minimum version with plenty of missing apps and functionality that could only be fixed by adding extra components, one at a time, after debugging whatever was currently breaking.

I appreciated that services and packages can be configured in the configuration file. But the options exposed are usually a partial set of what's available -- without extending the installations scripts yourself. So now my "declarative" config is a mix of what's in my nixOS config file and what's in my manually edited /etc files.

Third, the documentation, mentioned by others, is a mess. There's all kinds of information about old and new versions. The interfaces of the command-line tools seem to have changed between the 25.05 stable that I chose and the then-upcoming 25.11, which made following-along harder than it needed to be.

I eventually gave up because I needed a working machine and not a new hobby. I was left with the impression that NixOS might be a good choice for system admins, but perhaps not yet ready for desktop Linux users.

[zamalek]

I can completely understand how you were driven away. If you ever want to give it a go again:

> there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood

Nix never clicked for me until I started using flakes. There's a lot of internal drama surrounding them that honestly childish; that's why they are marked as experimental and not the official recommendation. You are going to have a worse time with Nix if you go with the official recommendation, flakes are significantly more intuitive. The Determinate Systems installer enables them by default, and whatever documentation they have is on the happier path (except for FlakeHub, I haven't figured that one out yet).

On the most fundamental level, flakes allow you to take /etc/nixos/nixos.nix (or whatever, it has been forever) out of /etc and into a git repository. Old-style nix may be able to do that, but I discovered flakes before trying. I did previously attempt to use git on /etc/nix, but git was falling to pieces with bizarre ownership problems.

What this means is that I could install and completely configure a machine, once booted into a nix iso, by running: nixos-install --flake https://github.com/.../repo.git. I manage all of my system config out of /home/$user/$clone

As for /home there is home-manager and, again, you are not steered towards it (the tutorial pushes you towards nix profiles/nix-env instead). Home-manager will do for your home directory what the system config does for your system, and has many program modules. You can even declare home-level systemd units and whatnot.

> manually edited /etc files.

You can use environment.etc for these files[1]. systemd.tmpfiles can be used for things outside of etc. Home-manager has the equivalent for .config, .local, .cache. [2].

[1]: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&query=envi... [2]: https://home-manager-options.extranix.com/?query=xdg.configF...

[throwawayqqq11]

Yep, i am doing the same. I have a central remote flake repo where all my machines, services, etc are defined and they all run tweaked autoupdaters to periodically do full updates. I push commits and wait and forget. It feels like maintaining your distro everywhere, no matter where you ssh in. And soon, i will migrate that repo off a central platform (github) into radicle or something and turn some of my machines into seeders. Then, with offsite data backups, my house could burn down and github go dark, i could still recover, maybe in the future even bootstrap from my smartphone. A big step towards digital sovereignity.

[gradstudent]

Great comment -- thank you!

[smrq]

The most NixOS comment I've seen yet was when I was trying to find out about `mkOutOfStoreSymlink`, which lead me to this thread:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-to-manage-dotfiles-with-ho...

> Hi, I just wanted to know, where can I find the documentation to know more about this contrib.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink option ?

> Well, since is a very simple function, no documentation is really needed.

I've been gradually transitioning everything to NixOS, starting with my homelab mini PC, then my Framework laptop, and now my daily driver desktop. It's hard to imagine going back because the pros are so strong compared to the cons, but the docs situation is truly dire.

[laserbeam]

That’s my feeling when reading nixos forums. People are willing to help but don’t realize how little newbies know about nix when asking for help. The first month of nixos was a massive uphill climb for me, and that knowledge doesn’t stick well because I get to interact with nix every few months to tweak things, not weekly or daily.

It’s a solid os, and I’m enjoying it, and I love that I can’t break things while tweaking. But the docs are and discussion threads are not written for beginners (it’s really hard to write for beginners).

[rgoulter]

> Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood

Flakes do 2 things:

1. Declaration of the inputs and outputs of some Nix codebase. 2. Pinning the versions of this input sources.

The dependency pinning is similar to package.json/package.lock etc. which are common in language-specific package managers.

[JamesSwift]

Sibling comment does a good job of going into flakes, but to answer this

> Do you install a package or a service

A package is like the raw software installation. So eg the bash package is just a wrapper around building bash from source (theoretically from source at least... you can also define a package as being a binary distribution as long as you specify the content hash). The service (actually the _module_) is for everything else around software installation. So, eg, the bash _package_ will build bash and have it available for you to put in your path but the bash _module_ might also configure your .bashrc and set it up as your users shell. It would also generally refer to the bash _package_ so you can do all that plumbing but specify a certain version of bash you want to use.

Another common example: a plex package would again build the plex software but a plex module would perhaps create a plex user, setup systemd units, open your firewall, and create a media directory.

EDIT: the next layer of confusion is that modules (which sort of are a secret-sauce of nix and so naturally you will want to use them a bunch) are specific implementation details of multiple subsystems in nix. Meaning, nixOS and home-manager and nix-darwin all have "modules" but they are not compatible. Each has its own "idea" of what modules are and nix itself doesnt provide this natively. That means things get a little more complicated/involved when you use those ecosystems together. Its not too bad but it is annoying.

[sharts]

I’m surprised nobody has bothered improving at least the documentation with a few LLM iterations.